Call for Papers ACLA 2009: Comics at War: From Troy to Sarajevo

[Dieter De Bruyn]

Dear Seelangers,

Please consider joining the following seminar (see below) at the upcoming 
ACLA 2009 Annual Meeting, devoted to the theme "Global Languages, Local 
Cultures", to be held at Harvard University on March 26-29, 2009. We are 
open to a variety of approaches and especially welcome contributions on 
Slavic and East European topics. The deadline is November 1.  Please post 
your paper proposals via the conference website 
(http://www.acla.org/acla2009/), selecting the name of this panel from the 
drop-down menu. If you are unfamiliar with the format of the ACLA 
conference, please check http://www.acla.org/annualmeetingguidelines.html. 
For more information on the seminar, please contact one of the seminar 
organizers, Dieter De Bruyn (dieter.debruyn at ugent.be), Michel De Dobbeleer 
(michel.dedobbeleer at ugent.be) or Stijn Vervaet (stijn.vervaet at ugent.be).

Best regards,
Dieter De Bruyn
Ghent University (UGent), Belgium

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Comics at War: From Troy to Sarajevo (http://www.acla.org/acla2009/?p=401)

Seminar Organizer: Dieter De Bruyn, Ghent U, Stijn Vervaet, Ghent U, Michel 
De Dobbeleer, Ghent U
War events have always been a popular topic in all kinds of narrative 
representations. Whereas literature and film are known as the most popular 
narrative media that deal with historical events, comics are a relatively 
new, but no less interesting artistic form for the representation of 
history. Even more, just like literature and film, comics may offer insights 
into historical processes that are generally absent in conventional 
historiographic narratives. This seminar aims at exploring the different 
ways in which all kinds of comics (ranging from traditional cartoons and 
comic books to such new subgenres as graphic novels, documentary and 
journalistic comic books, web comics, manga, etc.) have dealt with 
historical armed conflicts. Being a particular combination of text and 
images, comics seem to be suitably designed to reconcile the global code of 
visual culture with the local language of each particular war situation. We 
are interested in the ideological and narratological implications of 
representing and emplotting war history and, more particularly, in those 
artistic and narrative means that do justice to traumatic war events by 
distorting the "master narratives" of heroism and martyrdom.

Topics might focus on one of the following areas of interest:

  a.. Genres at war: new subgenres of comics (documentary and journalistic 
comic books, graphic novels, web comics, manga, etc.), comics and other 
media (literature, film, journalism, historiography, etc.)
  b.. Heroes at war: fictional versus historical heroes, war and armed 
conflicts in comic series
  c.. Cities at war: comics dealing with (symbolic) cities under siege 
(Troy, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Sarajevo, 
etc.)

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